Nervous Water (12 page)

“You don't think she'd leave him?”

“That's not what I'm saying,” he said. “But if she did, she'd have a plan.”

“Well,” I said, “where might she go?”

“Go? Anywhere. She's got friends all over the country. She has lots of friends. Cassie collects friends. Everybody loves her. She's one of those people, no matter how she treats you, you're always ready to forgive and forget and take her back.”

“How about you?”

“What, forgive and forget? Take her back?”

I nodded.

He rolled his eyes. “You've got to be kidding.”

“When was the last time you talked to her?”

“Not since she dumped me and moved in with the dentist. Over a year.”

“She has your numbers in her cell phone,” I said.

Webster cocked his head and narrowed his eyes at me. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“Generally the numbers you enter in your cell phone are the ones you call on a more or less regular basis.”

“You think I'm lying to you?”

“The thought crossed my mind.”

He frowned at me for a moment. Then he leaned back in his chair and laughed. “I like that,” he said. “Straight from the shoulder. Pull no punches.” He ran the palm of his hand over his face. “Okay, in the spirit of pulling no punches, you want to know what I think?”

I nodded.

“I think you should question the dentist as directly as you're questioning me here.”

“Why?”

“I don't trust him,” he said, “and I don't like him. I don't think he's a kind or loving man.”

“You've met him, then.”

“Only from what Cassie told me.”

“But you think Hurley's capable of…?”

He shook his head. “I don't know what he's capable of. Look. I'm completely prejudiced, I know. But I'm willing to bet he knows more than he's saying.”

“I bet you're right,” I said. “I bet you know more than you're saying, too.”

Grantham Webster grinned. “I like that,” he said. “Your candor, Mr. Coyne. Wonderful.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Does the name Faith Thurlow mean anything to you?”

He narrowed his eyes for a moment, then shook his head. “No. Should it?”

“It's Cassie's aunt,” I said. “I wondered if Cassie has been in touch with her.”

“As far as I know,” he said, “not when I was with her. Aside from her father, she never had much to say about her family. For example, I didn't know she had a cousin who was a Boston lawyer. I don't recall her ever mentioning an aunt named Faith…what was it?”

“Thurlow,” I said.

He spread his hands. “Look, Mr. Coyne. I don't know where Cassie is. What can I tell you?”

I shrugged. “Tell me about her.”

He looked at me. “Sure,” he said. “Why not.” He leaned back and laced his fingers behind his neck. “Where to start? I was an adjunct professor in Boulder working on my PhD. Taught a creative-writing seminar in the continuing ed program. Cassie was a part-time student. Older than the others. Smarter, more…more worldly. She was a terrific writer. She had real stories to tell, stories she'd lived, and she wasn't afraid of spilling her guts out on the page.” He smiled. “Not to mention, she was about the sexiest woman I ever laid eyes on.” He waved a hand in the air. “You see where I'm going here.”

“I think so,” I said.

“I was totally smitten with her, I don't mind telling you. And she was…” He smiled. “We did things that…well, that could've wrecked my career. I didn't care. I figured she'd get sick of me sooner or later. When I got this appointment here”—he waved his hand around his office—“I asked Cassie if she'd come with me. I was shocked when she said yes. I mean, what's a woman like Cassandra Crandall want with someone like me?”

“Rhetorical question, I assume,” I said.

“Poor-as-dirt untenured professor? Not to mention, an angry black man twelve years older'n her?”

“Are you angry?”

He smiled. “We live in a racist society, Mr. Coyne.”

“I don't know about Cassie,” I said. “But a lot of women would find those qualities irresistible.”

He nodded. “She did. For a while, anyway. Turned out, I was just a step along the way for Cassie. She always had an agenda. Oh, I think she liked me well enough. But for the long term, you can't beat a rich white suburban dentist.”

“You make her sound pretty cold.”

“Oh, no. Not at all. Cassie's way more complicated than that. She loved her freedom, loved her wild times, and she and I, we did have a lot of fun. But she had a profound need for security, too. Money, family, status, stability. All that American Dream stuff. She wasn't ever going to have that with some scrawny middle-aged African American from the hills of western Carolina, an assistant professor at a little second-rate college who has to teach summer courses to keep up with his credit-card payments.” He blew out a breath. “I worry about her. Cassie wants it all. She hasn't figured out, you can't have it all.” He looked at me. “That's my story, Mr. Coyne.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

He nodded and smiled. “She's special, that's for sure. I do miss her.”

“Can you think of anything else?”

“Nothing that will help you track her down, if that's what you mean. I have no idea what's she's up to.” He shrugged. “Never did.”

“If you think of anything else, or if you hear from Cassie, would you give me a call?” I stood up and put one of my business cards on his desk.

He picked up my card, looked at it, then dropped it back on his desk. “I don't expect to hear from Cassie,” he said. “But if I do…”

“Thanks.” I held my hand across his desk.

He half stood to shake it.

“I guess I was lucky to catch you here,” I said. “Mary Beth says you're very dedicated.”

“Dedicated.” He laughed quickly. “I should get a life, is the truth of it.”

I left Cabot College and slid into the westbound lane on Route 9, bound for Madison. As I crept along with the rest of the afternoon traffic that was emptying the city, I pondered what Grantham Webster had said…and I wondered what he hadn't said. He'd made no effort to disguise his scorn for Richard Hurley. He was harder to read on the subject of Cassie. I was convinced that he knew more than he'd revealed to me.

Route 9, with traffic lights every quarter of a mile, was stop-and-go—a lot more stop than go—all the way to 128, and then in Waltham they'd closed down all but one northbound lane to rebuild an overpass.

Route 2, when I finally got there, was jammed all the way from Crosby's Corner to the Concord Rotary without any help from construction work.

I never could understand why they called it “rush hour.”

By the time I pulled up in front of the police station in Madison, it was a little after five. I sat in my car for a few minutes, taking deep breaths, rotating my head on my stiff neck, and giving thanks that Evie and I lived in the city within walking distance of our offices.

The Madison police station was a dormered Cape Cod structure with weathered shingles, green shutters, window boxes, flower gardens, foundation plantings, and flagstone pathways. If you didn't notice the discreet sign in front and the two cruisers parked in the side lot, you'd mistake it for another suburban house, which was probably the whole point.

Immediately inside the front door there was a little enclosed lobby area with a bulletproof glass window. A gray-haired woman wearing a pink blouse and a pleasant smile sat behind the window like a ticket taker in her booth. I bent to the round vent at the bottom, gave her my name, and told her that I'd come to see Lieutenant Tony Hazen.

She nodded, spoke into a telephone, then looked up at me and said, “You can go on in, sir.” The door beside her window buzzed. I turned the knob and stepped into a small waiting room furnished in oak and glass and stainless steel.

I looked at the Wanted posters that were thumbtacked to the corkboard, and a minute later a tall fortyish guy wearing chino pants and a green checked shirt appeared. He had thinning sand-colored hair and sharp blue eyes. “You're Coyne?” he said.

I nodded.

“Hazen,” he said. “Your friend Horowitz asked me to cooperate with you. This way.”

He led me down a short corridor to his office. He sat behind his standard-issue gray metal desk—its top was utterly bare except for a telephone and a computer—and I took the metal chair across from him. Behind him, a big window looked out on some woods.

“You're interested in Hurley on Church Street, Horowitz tells me,” he said.

“Yes. His wife, really. Cassandra.”

“Horowitz said you seem to think she's missing.”

“Well,” I said, “I don't know about missing. But she's not home. Hasn't been for a couple weeks, anyway. Either her husband doesn't know where she is or he's keeping it a secret. I've tried calling, I've dropped by the house, I've left messages. It's got me worried.”

“Worried how?”

“That something's happened to her.”

“Such as…?”

I shook my head.

“People travel,” he said. “They visit relatives. They take vacations.”

“It's him,” I said. “Hurley. There's no reason he shouldn't tell me if Cassie's away visiting somebody or taking a vacation or something.”

He shrugged. “Maybe he thought it was none of your business.”

“Cassie's father—my uncle—has been trying to reach her. The voice-mail box on her cell phone is full.”

“Like she stopped answering her phone, returning her calls.”

“Yes.”

“Hm,” he said. “That's interesting. How do you know?”

“How do I know…?”

“About her cell phone.”

“Simple,” I said. “I tried to call her.”

He cocked his head, looked at me for a moment, then smiled. “Sure, okay. And why was it you said you wanted to talk to Mrs. Hurley?”

“Does it matter?”

He shrugged. “It might.”

“Her father had a heart attack,” I said. “It happened Monday morning. He's in the ICU at Maine Medical in Portland.”

Hazen shrugged. “Okay. Let's take a look.” He pecked on his computer keyboard for a minute, sat back and watched his monitor, and then looked up at me. “Well, this is interesting.”

“What's that?”

“Two weeks ago yesterday Dr. Hurley reported a missing handgun.”

I arched my eyebrows.

Hazen peered at his computer screen. “It's a Smith and Wesson thirty-eight. Chief's Special, two-inch barrel, stainless-steel finish. Current registration. Hurley has a license to carry.”

“I have a Chief's Special,” I said. “Mine has a three-inch barrel and a blue finish. I keep it in my office safe.”

He nodded. “Common weapon. I don't know any chiefs who actually have one.”

“So this one was stolen?”

“Missing.” He smiled. “Most of the time it turns out that a missing gun has just been misplaced. It's in a lockbox, and the cleaning lady moves it. The wife doesn't like the looks of it, sticks it in the back of a closet or something. Hurley said he usually keeps it in a drawer in the bedroom. Madison has a lot of expensive homes. We have our share of burglaries. A lot of our citizens register handguns.”

“He reported it when, did you say?”

“Fifteen days ago. But he said for all he knows it might've been missing for months. Claimed he never thinks about it, never had occasion to use it. Doesn't practice with it or anything.”

I was thinking that Hurley could've decided to use his gun to kill Cassie. Report it missing, then shoot Cassie, then dump the gun. If it somehow turned up and ballistics linked it to Cassie, Hurley would claim that he couldn't have done it because he didn't have the gun.

Well, that was a pretty old trick, and I didn't mention it to Lieutenant Hazen. I assumed the same thought had occurred to him.

“What else do you have?” I said. “Horowitz mentioned there'd been some 911 calls from the Hurley address.”

“Those go back quite a few years,” he said. “Before the present Mrs. Hurley lived there.”

“Can you tell me about them?”

“It's public record. The reports were published in the police blotter in the local paper at the time. You can go to the library, look 'em up.”

I smiled. “Roger Horowitz a friend of yours?”

He peered at me. “We started out together at the academy. I didn't know him that well. He was pretty gung ho, I remember that. We went in opposite directions. Me, I like it safe and peaceful. You can't get any safer or peacefuller than Madison. Horowitz, he's easily bored. He's not happy unless he's tracking down dangerous killers.” He shrugged. “He's a good cop. He was called in on a homicide we had out here a couple years ago. I had it figured all wrong. He saved my ass on that one.”

“He's saved mine a few times, too,” I said.

Hazen looked at me for a minute, then nodded and squinted at his monitor. “There've been, um, four 911 calls from that address on Church Street over the space of…nine years. First three, they were severe asthma attacks. Hurley's wife. His previous wife, I mean. Ellen Hurley. EMTs attended her at the scene, she was taken to the ER at Emerson Hospital, examined, treated, kept overnight, released the next day. The fourth time, she died before they got there.”

“What did she die of?”

“Asthma.”

“She died of an asthma attack?”

“Not that uncommon, I understand,” he said. “I heard the other day, Massachusetts is the asthma capital of the nation. Something to do with the pollen.”

“She didn't have medication?” I said.

“She did. She kept those whatchamacallits….”

“Inhalers?”

“Yes. She kept them all over the house.” He peered at his monitor. “This time? The time she didn't make it? It was April. She was outdoors. Washing windows or something, had one of her attacks, didn't have an inhaler with her, fell off her stepladder. Dr. Hurley called it in when he got home from work, found her there on the ground. Hard to tell how long she'd been there.” Hazen looked up at me. “You're thinking he had something to do with it?”

I nodded.

“I guess it's possible he did. No reason to think so at the time, though. At the time, it seemed like this woman had an asthma attack. Just the way it looked. When he called 911, Hurley said he found a pulse but she wasn't breathing. He did all the right things. Covered her, didn't try to move her, tried to get her to use an inhaler, gave her CPR. When the EMTs got there, they did whatever they do, but I guess it was too late.”

“Was there an autopsy?” I said.

Hazen looked at his computer. “Yes. At the request of the next of kin.”

“The husband?”

“Hurley. Right.”

“Why?”

“Why what?” he said. “Why'd he request a PM?”

“It was obvious, wasn't it?” I said. “Another asthma attack, except this time she didn't make it?”

“You'd have to ask him about that, I guess.”

I smiled. “Good idea.”

Hazen leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head, and looked at me. “You seem to want to make something out of this.”

“I'd rather not, actually.”

“Most of the time,” he said, “things are exactly what they appear to be, you know? They teach you that first day of cop school. Don't try to complicate something that's simple. Don't overlook the obvious. The commonest things most commonly happen. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck? Looks like the woman died of an asthma attack? Odds are good she died of an asthma attack.”

“I'm just thinking,” I said. “Two wives die, so he marries another one, and now she's…whatever. Missing.”

“Sure.” He smiled. “And the dentist murdered all three of 'em.” He leaned forward, planted his elbows on his desk, and said, “Look, Mr. Coyne. You come up with something more than an unfounded suspicion that some crime has been committed in my little town here, you let me know, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “I'll definitely do that.” I hesitated. “What about James Hurley?”

“What about him?”

“Do you have anything on him in your computer?”

“Horowitz didn't say anything about James Hurley.”

“I'm asking.”

Hazen sighed, pecked at his keyboard, then frowned at his monitor. “Don't see how this is relevant.”

I shrugged.

“Okay,” he said. “There were a couple of juvie things. They're sealed. And, um, a DUI two years ago. Resisted arrest.” He looked up at me. “Gave the officer a shove, used abusive language. Lost his license for six months. Five years' probation. That's it.”

“Do you know him?” I said.

“Sure. It's a small town. He's not a bad kid. Immature, quick-tempered, that's all. He'll be fine.” Hazen glanced pointedly at his watch. “Any other citizens I can help you out with?”

“No, that's fine.” I stood up and reached my hand across his desk. “Thanks for your time.”

He shook my hand without standing. “I meant what I said. You learn anything, you let me know.”

“Sure,” I said. “I will.”

“You can find your way out okay?”

I nodded. “Don't get up.”

He smiled and waved. “I wasn't planning to.”

 

From the Madison police station I headed back to the town common and turned onto Church Street. I slowed down as I approached Hurley's house. His Lexus was not parked in front of the garage, but his daughter Rebecca's Chevy sedan was.

Cassie's red Saab hadn't moved.

I turned into the driveway, parked beside the Chevy, and went to the front door. The screen door was closed, but the inside door was open.

I rang the bell.

“Just a minute,” came Rebecca's voice from the bowels of the house.

A minute later she appeared on the other side of the screen. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, no makeup, bare feet. She was wiping her hands on a dish towel. She blinked at me, then smiled. “Oh, hi. What's up? Cassie's not here.”

“I was actually hoping to speak with your father.”

“He's not home yet,” she said. “He has late appointments on Wednesday evenings. Some of his patients can't get away during the day, you know?”

“That's very flexible of him,” I said. “Maybe you—”

She held up her hand. “Hang on a sec.” She darted away.

She was back a minute later with her baby in her arms. “Sorry about that,” she said. “What were we saying?”

“I was just hoping—”

“Look,” she said. “Why don't you come on in. I've got dinner in the oven and a hungry baby here.”

“Really,” I said. “That's all right. I'll come back another time.”

“No, no,” she said, “come in.” She smiled and nodded, then reached out with her free hand and clicked the lock on the inside of the screen door.

I pulled it open, stepped into the dim coolness inside, and followed Becca Hurley through the living room into a big country kitchen. It had skylights and exposed beams and hardwood floors and stainless-steel appliances. Copper-bottomed cookware and bunches of dried herbs and braids of garlic hung from the beams. The back wall was all window.

She gestured at the kitchen table by the window. “Have a seat.” She slid the baby into a high chair and dropped a small handful of Cheerios on the tray.

I sat, and she sat across from me. The aroma of roasting lamb and garlic was in the air. A small television on the counter was reporting the news. “Something smells good,” I said. “Your father's a lucky man to have you to cook for him.”

“Oh, usually I don't. But since Cassie…”